Burger's Daughter

Three

Children and children’s children. The catchphrase of every reactionary politician and every revolutionary, and every revolutionary come to power as a politician. Everything is done in the name of future generations.

I’m told even people who have no religious beliefs sometimes have the experience of being strongly aware of the dead person. An absence fills again — that sums up how they describe it. It has never happened to me, with you; perhaps one needs to be in the close surroundings where one expects to find that person anyway — and our house was sold long ago. I didn’t ask them for your ashes, contrary to the apocryphal story the faithful put around and I don’t deny, that these were refused me. After all, you were also a doctor, and to sweep together a handful of potash…futile relic of the human body you regarded as such a superb example of functionalism. Apocrypha, on the other hand, has its uses. It’s unlikely they would have given me the ashes if I had asked.

I cannot explain to anyone why that telephone call in the middle of the night made everything that was possible, impossible. Not to anyone. I cannot understand why what he had to say and his manner — even before the phone-call, even in the room where we met — incensed me so. I’ve heard all the black clichés before. I am aware that, like the ones the faithful use, they are an attempt to habituate ordinary communication to overwhelming meanings in human existence. They rap out the mechanical chunter of a telex; the message has to be picked up and read. They become enormous lies incarcerating enormous truths, still extant, somewhere. I’ve experienced before the same hostility: being treated as if I were not there — the girl and the young man once at Fats’ place, for example; and then I didn’t feel mean and vile and find weapons ready to hand. Like liberal reaction to understand and forgive all, this vengeful excitation is foreign to me. The habit of sorting into objectively correct and false assumptions the position taken — the sane habit of our kind saves me from the ridiculousness and vanity of personal affront. ‘A war in South Africa will doubtless bring about enormous human suffering. It may also, in its initial stages, see a line-up in which the main antagonists fall broadly into racial camps, and this would add a further tragic dimension to the conflict. Indeed if a reasonable prospect existed of a powerful enough group among the Whites joining in the foreseeable future with those who stand for majority rule, the case for revolt would be less compelling.’ Your biographer quoted that to me for confirmation of a faithful reflection of the point of view. Then why be so — disintegrated, yes; I dissolved in what I heard from him, the acid. Why so humiliated because I had — automatically, not thinking — bobbed up to him with the convention of affection, of casual meetings exchanged with the cheeks of the Grosbois, Bobby, Georges and Manolis, Didier — a rubbing of noses brought back from a trip to see Eskimos. What did that matter?

What was said has been rearranged a hundred times: all the other things I could have said, substituted for what I did say, or at least what I remember having said. How could I have come out with the things I did? Where were they hiding? I don’t suppose you could tell me. Or perhaps if I had grown up at a different time, and could have had an open political education, these things would have been dealt with. I could have been helped. Katya was surely ineducable, in that sense. Our Katya — she exaggerates for effect; I would gladly be censured, by you or the others, for being able to say what I did. ‘Unless you want to think being black is the right.’ Repelled by him. Hating him so much! Wanting to be loved! — how I disfigured myself. How filthy and ugly, in the bathroom mirror. Debauched. To make defence of you the occasion for trotting out the holier-than-thou accusation — the final craven defence of the kind of people for whom there is going to be no future. If we’d still been children, I might have been throwing stones at him in a tantrum.

I took my statements (I thought of them that way; I had to answer for them, to myself) one by one, I carried them round with me and saw them by daylight, turned over in my hand while I was sitting at my class, or talking softly on the telephone to Paris. How do I know what it is he is doing in London? Maybe he goes illegally in and out of South Africa as his father did, on missions I should know he can’t own to. ‘This kind of talk sounds better from people who are in the country than people like us.’ To taunt him by reminding him that he is thousands of miles away from the bush where I thought he might have died fighting; I! To couple his kind of defection with mine, when back home he’s a kaffir carrying a pass and even I could live the life of a white lady. With the help of Brandt, I don’t suppose it’s too late for that.

Is it money you want?

But those five words that came back most often presented themselves differently from the way they had been coldly thrust at him to wound, to make venal whatever his commitment is. They came back not as the response to the criminal hold-up, but as the wail of someone buying off not a threat but herself.

There’s nothing unlikely about meeting a man on holiday whom one comes to love, but such a meeting — with Baasie — is difficult to bring about. There was no avoiding it, then? In one night we succeeded in manoeuvring ourselves into the position their history books back home have had ready for us — him bitter; me guilty. What other meeting-place could there have been for us? There have been so many arrests, trials, interrogations, fleeings: failures. The Future has been a long time coming, and who’s going to recognize the messiah by the form he finally takes? Isaac Vulindlela called his son ‘suffering land’ and probably never translated the name for you, his comrade, either, and you called your daughter after that other Rosa — ah, if you’d heard us at each other… What a bastard he is! What a bitch.

But at least you know; you still know — there is only one end to the succession of necessary failures. Only one success; the life, unlike his or mine, that makes it all the way to the only rendezvous that matters, the victory where there will be room for all.

A squabble between your children.

My Chabalier — of course I told him about the meeting, the phone-call in the middle of the night. The family history, Baasie and me. My poor darling. You of all people. But he was drunk, eh — poor devil. You really should have put down the phone. To hell with the stupid cunt, then. I don’t care who he is!…Maybe a bit crazy? You know, an exile, black, it’s hard. Je hais, done je suis. What else is there for such a one? An exile, living it up in London, sponging…just drinking themselves to death…self-pity, even in Paris there are some, hanging about out of favour with this regime or that.

All these things; and once my love said (I wish it had not been over the telephone. If I could have seen his face, the gestures — I might have found, at that point, how to explain what was happening to me, I might have found he was moving to come between it and me) — he said — There are some things you can tell only in the middle of the night…and what you mean is that next day they will have disappeared for good — probably next time…if you ever see him again it will be all right. — But there was only the voice of Bernard Chabalier. The chance was gone. Don’t be upset, my darling. Of course you lost your temper. Your father! It’s absurd. Everyone, black and white…no matter what political differences. Whatever happens. A noble life. What does it matter if some crazy chap comes along with his own frustrations in the middle of the night — that’s all it amounts to… We really shouldn’t even get excited. But it’s natural, you were outraged.

He hit upon the word I sometimes use to describe your kind of anger; but of course mine was not like that. A foreigner, he had probably picked up the word from me.

The fact is that after a few days my obsession with what had been said to me that night and what I had said or should have said, should have done (nearly twenty years, and then that borrowed, bar-room embrace!) left me. Deserted me. I solved nothing but was no longer badgered. There’s no explanation for how this comes about. Silence. In place of the obsession were the simple, practical facts of a life being planned. A little apartment had been found with a tiny balcony not big enough to put a chair out on but enough for a pigeon to have found a ledge where to lay an egg. That was sufficient to tip the decision in favour of taking the place — the pigeon already in residence on its egg. It was impossible to be lonely in the company of that pigeon, êh. There was no view because unfortunately the rooms faced one of the narrow side streets (quieter, anyway) but the building was actually on a very old forgotten square, almost like a courtyard, where there was a church with a clock that whirred before it chimed. Two chestnut trees. No grass, but a bench. A good baker nearby. A hole-in-the-corner shop run by a nice Arab couple, maman and son, where yoghurt and groceries and even cheap wine could be bought at all hours — apparently they never close. The metro to dive into at the corner — and it was one of the old ones, green copper curlicues, genuine art nouveau — two stops exactly from the lycee.

I wrote down the address and left the piece of paper where I would keep seeing it. I read it over often. I had no sense of having been in the kind of streets that led there, only a few blocks from a High School. Paris. ‘Paris is a place far away in England.’

It isn’t Baasie — Zwel-in-zima, I must get the stress right — who sent me back here. You won’t believe that. Because I’m living like anyone else, and he was the one who said who was I to think we could be different from any other whites. Like anyone else; but the idea started with Brandt Vermeulen. You and my mother and the faithful never limited yourselves to being like anyone else.

I had met a woman in her nightdress wandering in the street. She was like anyone else: Katya, Gaby, Donna; poor thing, a hamster turning her female treadmill. I remember every detail of that street, could walk it with my eyes shut. My sense of sorority was clear. Nothing can be avoided. Ronald Ferguson, 46, ex-miner, died on the park bench while I was busy minding my own business. No one can defect.

I don’t know the ideology:

It’s about suffering.

How to end suffering.

And it ends in suffering. Yes, it’s strange to live in a country where there are still heroes. Like anyone else, I do what I can. I am teaching them to walk again, at Baragwanath Hospital. They put one foot before the other.

Rosa Burger’s return to her native country within the period for which her passport was valid coincided with two events rivalling each other in prominence in the newspapers. Orde Greer was on trial for treason. He was accused on three counts: of having written one of the (discarded) versions of the text of a leaflet, alleged to be inciting, distributed in Cape Town by means of a pamphlet-bomb exploded in a street; of harbouring certain manuals pertaining to urban guerrilla warfare, including Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État and the writings of General Giap; and — the chief indictment — having attempted to recruit a young man of a well-known liberal family, doing his compulsory military service, to supply information and photographic material relating to South Africa’s defence installations and equipment. The trial was well under way. The State had almost concluded its evidence when Rosa Burger attended a session. The trial was held in Johannesburg because Greer was not considered a sufficiently prominent personality for there to be any risk of whites crowding the court, and with the growing political separatism between white and black radicals it was thought that the mobs of blacks who rally where political trials of their own kind are in progress would be unlikely to gather. In fact hundreds of blacks congregated outside the courts each day; the trial was transferred to a remote maize-farming town in the Eastern Transvaal before the Defence was heard.

At the stage at which Rosa was present the court was still sitting in Johannesburg. Someone made room for her on the very end of a bench in the last row of the visitors’ gallery; she had in her coat-pocket a scarf handy, but found since her father was on trial the talmudic convention by which women were expected to cover their heads in the presence of a judge had lapsed. Orde Greer was being cross-examined on the State evidence of the recording of a long-distance telephone call monitored by a device he was not aware had been installed, in his flat, by the post office on the instructions of the Security Branch, BOSS. The court heard the whirr of the tape then Orde Greer’s voice, not sober, at one point maudlin, asking what had he done? What had he failed to do? The call was identified with documentary evidence that the person to whom it was addressed, and who had replaced the receiver at once on (presumably) recognizing the voice and hearing the first few sentences, was a former South African Communist, an expert on explosives as a result of his experiences as a Desert Rat during the war and now believed to be directing urban terrorism in South Africa. The Prosecution put it to Greer that first having been recruited some time in 1974, he had been dropped by the Communist Party because of unreliability. He had a drinking problem, didn’t he? His masters’ lack of confidence in him was vindicated beyond all doubt by this preposterous telephone call asking for further instructions in the underground work they had entrusted him with… Acting on a sense of ‘disappointed destiny’ he had been ‘devilishly inspired’—had he not? — to prove himself to his masters, to reinstate himself in their good books. He had even conquered his drinking, for a time. He consulted a doctor about his drinking problem, visiting Dr A. J. Robertse, a Durban psychiatrist, on 25th February 1975, while on an assignment to that town in the course of his work as a journalist. He had told Dr Robertse that he was under stress due to marital problems. But he had no ‘marital’ problems; he was not, had never been married, his problems were with his masters, the Communists in London, who no longer trusted him because of his drinking. He had determined to show himself worthy of them, and it was therefore he himself, acting on his own initiative but strictly within the aims and objects of the Communist Party, who had tried to obtain military information by persuading a young National Serviceman that if he were indeed a liberal vociferously opposed to the policy of apartheid, he ought to be willing to steal documents, make sketches, take photographs that could lead to the destruction of the army by whose strength the policy was maintained — in short, that this young man’s duty was not to defend his country but to become a traitor to it.

Rosa Burger was not able to attend the trial again. A week after her return she took up an appointment in the physiotherapy department of a black hospital. She followed the proceedings, like everyone else, in the newspapers. The Defence admitted that Orde Greer had written a text which appeared in a somewhat different form as a leaflet distributed by means of a harmless explosive device (‘no more revolutionary than a firework set off on New Year’s Eve’). The difference in the texts was crucial: Greer’s version (Exhibit A of the documentation seized on the occasions when his flat was raided by the police) included no exhortations to violence, whereas the text of the leaflet actually disseminated had several statements, clearly added later and by someone else, that possibly could be interpreted to be of this nature. The well-known phrase used by Greer — was it not heard in every pulpit, employed to put the righteous fear of God into every Christian community? — ‘day of reckoning’ was by no means a threat of violence or an encouragement to violence. It was, on the contrary, a reminder that everyone would have to account to his own conscience for his convictions and actions, in the end.

There was long argument between Defence and Prosecution on the definition of ‘manual’: was Clausewitz’s classic on strategy a ‘manual’ or an historical work on the waging of warfare, a special kind of military memoir? And if the latter, were not General Giap’s writings a modern counterpart? As for the Luttwak book on the do-it-yourself coup—could anybody take such a work seriously? Was it not patently the sort of radical chic with which people living in politically stable countries titillated themselves, a subject of cocktail-party expertise? — The judge asked for a definition of the term ‘radical chic’, and this provided an item for a journalist whose assignment was sidelights, preferably ironical if not bathetic, on the trial. — And taken in the context of the reading matter of a man who was demonstrably an exceptionally wide reader — a man who earned a modest salary and must have spent a good percentage of it on the 3,000-odd books, on all subjects, that were the main furnishings of his tiny flat — was the presence of the Giap and Luttwak books of any significance? The defendant would say he had been sent both books by publishers, for review during the period when he had been acting literary editor of a journal.

Finally, the Defence provided a sensational poster for the evening paper by keeping quiet, until the appropriate moment, about a discovery made: the ‘expert on explosives’ identified by the State as the man to whom Greer was talking in the incoherent taped telephone conversation had been in Stockholm on the date on which the call was faithfully recorded by the device secretly attached to Greer’s telephone. The number was that listed under the man’s name in the London telephone directory, yes, but the subscriber himself was not living in England at the time. There was no proof that the person who answered the telephone was a member of the Communist Party, in fact there was no proof of any identity that could be attached to that voice; and whoever it belonged to had replaced the receiver promptly, as one normally does when one gets a nuisance call. The defendant would not deny the evidence that he was not sober when the call was made. In fact he would submit that he had no memory of having made the call.

But it was the main count — the alleged recruitment of a young liberal doing his military service stint — that roused fly-bitten, carious-breathed antagonisms sleeping beneath the table, in the white suburbs. Quiet dinners among intelligent people turned shrill and booming as men and women gave vent to their secret judgments of each other’s political and personal morality under the guise of disagreement about the political and moral significance not so much of Orde Greer’s action as that of the young man whom he had approached. This young man had at first agreed to do what Greer asked, and was in a position to do so because he was some sort of assistant-cum-driver to a military press attaché, often accompanying his officer with the top brass on official inspection of secret installations around the country, humble enough in status to be ignored as a piece of furniture, but with ears and eyes wide open, and hands with access to files and photographs kept as classified information. After a brief period during which he produced nothing for Greer except a confidential guide to behaviour when among foreign rural blacks — a leaflet issued to South African troops during the invasion of Angola — he apparently grew afraid or decided for some other reason that he was not willing to continue his commitment to Greer. With fist closed at rest beside a wineglass, if not thumped, someone insisted that the proper course for that young man, if he was so repelled by the idea of serving in ‘that army’, if it went so strongly against his principles, was to become a conscientious objector. Not a spy. The liberal position was to oppose the present regime openly, not betray the right of the people of the country to defend themselves against foreign powers who wanted to take advantage of this situation. — A younger man laughed fiercely: When would people learn that this playing-fields morality showed a complete misunderstanding of what repression is. — You say you want to free the blacks and ourselves of this government, and at the same time you expect people to ‘play the game’, be ‘decent’—Christ! Apartheid is the dirtiest social swindle the world has ever known — and you want to fight it according to the rules of patriotism and honesty and decency evolved for societies where everyone has something worth protecting from betrayal. These virtues, these precious ‘standards’ of yours — they’re just another swindle, here, don’t you see? The blacks haven’t ever been allowed into your schools, your clubs, your army, for God’s sake, so what do the rules mean? Whose rules? You say you’re against white supremacy — then you can’t confine your conscience to moral finesse only whites can afford. That chap had every right to use his compulsory army service to take any information he could get that would contribute to destroying that army and all it stands for. What’s ‘done’, what ‘isn’t’; I just want to smash these bastards here every way we can. Do you want to get rid of them or don’t you? That’s all I ask myself. — William Donaldson interrupted the argument with a choice of Grand Marnier or Williamine while his wife Flora followed with the serving of the coffee.

Orde Greer was found guilty on the main count of the indictment and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. The one occasion on which Rosa had seen him in court he was smartened up like a scruffy boy made presentable for a summons to the headmaster’s office. His beard was shaved off. His hair, still long, had been combed wet until tamed. He wore a tan corduroy suit provided by someone who didn’t want to go so far as to put him entirely out of character in navy pin-stripe. She did not think he saw her in the gallery. His gingerish, unattractive face (for a long time the eyes in their deep archways, the thin, twirly intelligent mouth, the high bifurcated forehead with the frizz of hair behind the ears would be the image with which the faces of all men would be matched) — Orde Greer’s face was quiet and privately enquiring, as if he and his accusers were going through some process of scrutiny together, as one. She had this transparency of Greer across her mind when she read that in his opportunity to address the court he had said (inevitably) he had acted according to his conscience. Then he had interrupted himself — saying no, no — that was just a phrase, what he meant was according to ‘necessity’. People were detained every day merely for expressing too freely their conviction that theirs was an unjust, hypocritical and cruel society. ‘I’ve spent many years being proud of hob-nobbing with the people who were brave enough to risk their lives in action. I spent too many years looking on, writing about it; I would rather go to prison now for acting against evil than have waited to be detained without even having done anything.’

The other front-page story became one only when it was learned that a South African was involved. Before then it was a European affair, concerning the hijackings, kidnappings of industrialists and murders of embassy officials and politicians for which responsibility was claimed by, and sometimes imputed to international terrorist groups. A man known as Garcia, believed to be of Bolivian origin and belonging to the Armed Nucleus For Popular Autonomy (NAPAP), the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang, or perhaps some new grouping including these and others, was thought to be the brain behind the most recent series of urban terrorist activities. He remained at large and had been sheltered by a number of women, each unaware of the others’ existence, with whom he had love affairs in London, Amsterdam and Paris. The one in Paris turned out to be a South African girl employed by the Citrus Board to promote the sale of oranges. The story dominated the Sunday papers; she was Marie Nel, daughter of a prominent Springbok Flats farmer, who with his wife also ran the dorp hotel. There were photographs of its façade, showing the bar and the name above it: C. J. S. Nel, Licensed to sell wine and spirituous liquors. There was a photograph of Marie Nel of the startled flashlight kind taken by itinerant photographers in nightclubs; the occasion appeared to be Christmas or New Year, and the venue must have been a South African city — a smiling Indian waiter in the background.

The story took on another week’s lease of life when one of the journalists, no doubt in the course of snooping about the dorp, learned that Mrs Velma Nel was the sister of Lionel Burger. To many readers this seemed some sort of explanation. The differences between the anarchic phenomenon of a Baader-Meinhof gang or something called the Japanese Red Army which had little to do with Japan, and the ideas of a Lionel Burger who wanted to hand over his country to the blacks, were blurred by the equal distance of such ideas from these readers’ comprehension. Marie Nel’s cousin, daughter of Lionel Burger and only surviving member of his immediate family, was working as a physiotherapist in a Johannesburg hospital. An old photograph reproduced from the newspaper’s files showed a young girl coming out of court in the course of her father’s trial.

Not even a postcard from the Musée de Cluny.

The unicorn among the beautiful medieval ladies, the tapestry flowers, shy rabbits; the mirror. O dieses ist das Tier das es nicht gibt. At the conjunction of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Boulevard Saint-Michel. An old abbey on the site of Gallo-Roman thermae, and she would walk into the court-yard described and up into the half-round hall where you can sit on the shallow well of steps and look at the six tapestries. On an azure island of a thousand flowers the Lady is holding a mirror in which the unicorn with his forelegs on the folded-back red velvet of her dress’s lining sees a tiny image of himself. But the oval of the mirror cuts off the image just at the level at which the horn rises from his head: a horn white as his coat, plumed tail, mane and curly beard, a tall horn delicately turned. Two tresses of her golden hair are bound with a fillet of pearls up round her oval face (like the gilt frame round the mirror) and twisted together on top of her head imitating the modelling of his horn, which at the same time is itself an artifice, êh, bone fashioned to imitate a spiral… A smiling lion holds an armorial pennon. Rabbits are there, a dog, a spotted genet. Foxes, cheetahs, lion cubs, a falcon pursuing a heron, partridges, a pet monkey tethered by a chain to a little roller — that was done to prevent it from climbing trees — these are to be made out round the representation of the other four senses:

The Lion and the Unicorn listening to music played in the garden by the Lady on her portable organ.

The Lady weaving sweet-smelling carnations into a chaplet while her monkey sniffs at a rose inquisitively pilfered from a basket.

The Lady taking sweets from a dish held by her maid; she may be going to feed them to her parakeet — the monkey is secretly tasting something good.

The Lady touches the Unicorn’s horn.

A sixth tapestry shows the Lady before a sumptuous pavilion or tent, amusing herself with a box of jewels. In medieval Bestiaries he is called a ‘monocheros’; he is there, paired with the Lion this time, holding aside with a hoof one of the flaps of the tent and gracefully rampant (the ridiculous position of a begging dog), supporting her standard. A legend is woven in gold round the canopy of the tent, A mon seul désir.

Here they are: to love you by letting you come to discover what I love.

There she sits, gazing, gazing.

An old and lovely world, gardens and gentle beauties among gentle beasts. Such harmony and sensual peace in the age of the thumbscrew and dungeon that there it comes with its ivory spiral horn

there she sits gazing

bedecked, coaxed, secured at last by a caress — O the pretty dear! the wonder! Nothing to startle, nothing left to fear, approaching—

There she sits, gazing, gazing. And if it’s time for the museum to close, she can come back tomorrow and another day, any day, days.

Sits gazing, this creature that has never been.

The children Rosa was teaching to walk who were born crippled were getting excellent rehabilitative care, better than her doctor half-brother could dream about providing in Tanzania. In the second half of 1976 those who were born deformed were joined by those who had been shot. The school riots filled the hospital; the police who answered stones with machine-guns and patrolled Soweto firing revolvers at any street-corner group of people encountered, who raided High Schools and picked off the targets of youngsters escaping in the stampede, also wounded anyone else who happened to be within the random of their fire. The hospital itself was threatened by a counter-surge of furious sorrow that roused the people of Soweto to burn and pillage everything the whites had ‘given’ in token for all, through three centuries, they had denied the blacks. The million or more (no one knows the exact figure) residents of Soweto have no municipality of their own; a white official who had done what he could, within the white-run welfare system for blacks, to help them endure their lives, was stoned and kicked to death. Other white officials had narrow escapes; several were rescued and hidden safely by blacks themselves, in their own houses. There was no way of identifying one’s white face as one that was different from any other, one that should be spared. The white doctors and other personnel among the hospital staff drove back and forth between the hospital and the white city of Johannesburg every day, privileged to pass through police roadblocks that isolated the Soweto area, and at the risk of being surrounded and dragged from their cars as they moved along the road where the armoured police vehicles the people called Hippos had gone before them, raising fists useless against steel plates and guns.

After the funerals of the first wave of children and youths killed by the police, at each successive burial black people were shot while gathered to pay homage to their dead or at the washing of hands at the house of the bereaved that is their custom. The police said it was impossible to distinguish between mourners and the mob; and they spoke more truly than they knew — mourning and anger were fused.

Although the white personnel at the hospital had knowledge of events and consequences in the black townships only touched upon by the reports in the newspapers gathered, among dangers and difficulties, by black journalists, no one of the white hospital staff could go into the places from which the patients came. Extracting bullets from the matrix of flesh, picking out slivers of shattered bone, sewing, succouring, dripping back into arteries the vital fluids that flowed away in the streets with the liquor from bottles smashed by children who despised their fathers’ consolations, these white people could not imagine what it was like to be living as their patients did. Rosa was visited one Sunday night in her flat by an acquaintance, Fats Mxenge. He apologized for turning up without warning, but it was not wise to use the telephone although (of course) he was one of the few people in Soweto to have one. He had a message; when it had been delivered he sat in her flat (a one-roomed ‘studio’ affair she had moved into when she returned from Europe) and accepted the brandy and hot tea she offered. He looked around him; someone brought aboard out of a tempest and seeing drawn curtains, lamplight, the turntable of the player circling where a record had just been lifted. He tossed off the brandy and then stirred the tea, knees close, stirred and stirred. Shook his head in summation — gave up. They exchanged the obvious. — Terrible, it’s terrible, man. I just want to get my kids out, that’s all. — She began to talk of some of the things she had seen at the hospital, not in her department: a little girl who had lost an eye; she was used to working with horrors (she used the word ‘deformities’) about which something could be done — nerves slowly brought back to feeling, muscles strengthened to flex again. — The left eye. Seven or eight years old. Gone for good. — She was not able to describe the black hole, the void she was seeing where the eye ought to be. — Last week the man who lives in the next house to us — you know our place? you’ve been there with Marisa — just there, the next house, he went out to buy something at the shop, candles, something his mother wanted. Never came back. She came over — she says, what must she do? Go to the police, my wife told her, ask them where he is — she thought he’s arrested. So the woman goes to the police and asks, where is my son, where can I look for him. D‘you know what they told that woman? ‘Don’t ask us here, go to the mortuary.’—

— I pass by on my way home. There’s been a queue outside every day. — A bus queue of black men and women waited, orderly, to lift up sheet after sheet to find the familiar face among the dead. There were babies, of course, asleep, warm and wet against backs under the blanket, there are always babies. There were the usual shopping bags that lug newspaper parcels of sustenance to courts and hospitals and prisons; one woman had a plaid Thermos flask sticking up out of her bag — the queue was long, and some people would have to come back next day.

— The police must’ve shot him between our place and the shop. Shot dead. She identified him all right. Just there in his own street, man. It was about nine at night when he went out, that’s all. You lock yourself in and stay home as soon as it’s dark. You don’t move, man. I won’t go back tonight, a-a-h no! I can tell you — when it’s dark I’m afraid to go across my yard to the lavatory. I never know when I’m going to get a bullet in my head from the police or a knife in me from someone else. — He shook back shirt cuffs with square gilt and enamel links. He was dressed for success and happiness, his usual snappy clothes, like a woman who has nothing to hand in an emergency but the outfit she wore to dinner last night and left hanging over the chair when she went to bed. — Every morning I expect to find my car burned out. We’ve got no garages in our places. What can I do? It stands in the street. The students are going around setting fire to the cars of reps and so on, people who have good jobs with white firms… Who doesn’t work for whites? If they know the owner of such-and-such a car is a sports promoter who arranges boxing matches with whites… They can come after me… — His laugh was an exclamation, protest. — What this government has done to us. Can I just — She pushed the brandy bottle over to him and he helped himself. She tipped the last drops of tea out of her cup and poured brandy into it, taking a first sip that burned along her lips voluptuously while she listened. — I want to get my kids out, that’s all. Margaret and the baby can go down to Natal with the old lady — her people are there. I want to put the older kids in boarding-school somewhere… But you know what the students are saying? They’re going to go to the trains when the kids leave for schools in the country and they’re going to stop them, they’re going to drag them off the trains. They say no one must break the boycott. And they’ll do it, I’m telling you, they’ll do it. I’ll take mine away by car. They don’t listen to me or their mother, there’s no school, they run in the streets and how d’you know every day they’re going to come back alive?—

— I don’t know what I would do. — She was white, she had never had a child, only a lover with children by some other woman. No child but those who passed under her hands, whom it was her work to put together again if that were possible, at the hospital.

SOWETO STUDENTS REPRESENTATIVE COUNCIL

Black people of Azania remember our beloved dead! Martyers who were massacred from the 16th June 1976 and are still being murdered. We should know Vorster’s terrorists wont stop their aggressive approach on innocent Students and people who have dedicated themselves to the liberation of the Black man in South Africa — Azania. They shall try at all costs to suppress the feelings of the young men and women who see liberation a few kilometres if not metres There’s no more turning back, we have reached a point of no return as the young generation in this challenging country. We have proved that we are capable of changing the country’s laws as youths this we shall persue until we reach the ultimate goat — UHURU FOR AZANIA.

Remember Hector Peterson the 13 year old Black child of Azania, a future leader we might have produced, fell victim to Kruger’s uncompromising and uncontrollable gangsters of the riot squad. What does his parents say, what do his friends say, what does the stupid and baldheaded soldier who killed — actually murdered him in cold blood — say, of course he is less concerned. What do you say as an oppressed Black and brother to Hector? Remember our learned scientist ‘who decided to commit suicide all of a sudden’ Tshazibane? We suspect that somebody somewhere knows something about this ‘suicide’ For how long will our people persue with these ‘suicide attempt’ and ‘successful suicides’.

Remember Mabelane who ‘attempted to escape from John Vorster Square by jumping through the 10th floor window’ apparently avoiding some questions? Remember our crippled brothers and sisters who have been disabled deliberately by people who have been trained to disrespect and disregard a black man as a human being? Remember the blood that flowed continuously caused by wounds inflicted by Vorster’s gangsters upon the innocent mass demonstrating peacefully? What about the bodies of our dead colleagues which were dragged into those monsterous and horrible looking riot squad vehicles called hippos? We the students shall continue to shoulder the wagon of liberation irrespective of these racists maneouvers to delay the inevitable liberation of the Black masses. June the 16th will never be erased in our minds. It shall stand known and registered in the minds of the people as STUDENTS’ DAY as students have proved beyond all reasonable doubt on that DAY that they are capable of playing an important role in the liberation of this country without arms.

We are also aware of the system’s conspiracy:

1. To discredit present and past leadership with the hope of distracting the masses from the leaders.

2. To capture present leadership with the hope of retarding the student’s struggle and achievements.

FORWARD FOREVER…………………BACKWARD NEVER!!!

issued by the S.S.R.C.

Our children and our children’s children. The sins of the fathers; at last, the children avenge on the fathers the sins of the fathers. Their children and children’s children; that was the Future, father, in hands not foreseen.

You knew it couldn’t be: a change in the objective conditions of the struggle sensed sooner than the leaders did. Lenin knew; the way it happened after the 1905 revolution: as is always the case, practice marched ahead of theory. The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new. They seem to know what is to be done. They don’t go to school any more and they are being ‘constantly reeducated by their political activity’. The parents who form committees to mediate between their children and the police are themselves being detained and banned. It could happen to Fats; a black heavyweight can win a title from a white heavyweight now and black and white teams play together on the soccer fields, but that isn’t what the children will accept. It has even happened to Mrs Daphne Mkhonza, who used to come to Flora’s lunch parties. There are new nightclubs in Johannesburg where fashionable get-ups provide consumers’ equality and apparently privilege the self-styled black and white socialites from police raids. But these are not the kind of pleasures on which the children are set. The black men with yearnings to be third-class, non-Europeans-only-city-fathers, who sat on the Advisory Boards and school boards set up by the whites have resigned at the threat of a generation’s retribution. The people who were Uncle Toms, steering clear of the Mofutsanyanas, Kotanes, Luthulis, Mandelas, Kgosanas, Sobuk-wes who went to jail for the ANC and PAC have begun to see themselves at last as they are; as their children see them. They have been radicalized — as the faithful would say — by their children; they are acting accordingly; they are being arrested and detained. The real Rosa believed the real revolutionary initiative was to come from the people; you named me for that? This time it’s coming from the children of the people, teaching the fathers — the ANC, BPC, PAC, all of them, all the acronyms hastening to claim, to catch up, the theory chasing events.

The kind of education the children’ve rebelled against is evident enough; they can’t spell and they can’t formulate their elation and anguish. But they know why they’re dying. You were right. They turn away and screw up their eyes, squeal ‘Eie-na!’ when they’re given an injection, but they kept on walking towards the police and the guns. You know how it is they understand what it is they want. You know how to put it. Rights, no concessions. Their country, not ghettos allotted within it, or tribal ‘homelands’ parcelled out. The wealth created with their fathers’ and mothers’ labour and transformed into the white man’s dividends. Power over their own lives instead of a destiny invented, decreed and enforced by white governments. — Well, who among those who didn’t like your vocabulary, your methods, has put it as honestly? Who are they to make you responsible for Stalin and deny you Christ?

Something sublime in you — I couldn’t say it to anyone else. Not in your biography. You would have met in your own person with what happened to blacks at Bambata, at Bulhoek, at Bondelswart, at Sharpeville. But this time they are together as they never have been, ever, not in the defeat of the ‘Kaffir’ wars, not at Bambata’s place, at Bulhoek, at the Bondelswarts’ place, Sharpeville. It’s something peculiarly their own? You used me as prison visitor, courier, whatever I was good for, you went to prison for your life and ended it there, but would you have seen yourself watching Tony and me, hand-in-hand, approaching guns? You will never tell me. You will never know. It’s not given to us (don’t worry, the reference is to the brain’s foresight, not to a niggardly God; I haven’t turned religious, I haven’t turned anything, I am what I always was) to know what makes us afraid or not afraid. You must have been afraid sometimes; or you couldn’t have had your sweet lucidity. But you were a bit like the black children — you had the elation.

I ran away. Baasie was repulsive to me; I let repugnance in: the dodge-em course between diverticulitis, breast cancer, constipation, impotence, bones and obesity. I was scared. You would laugh. You knew about such things all along; when people are dead one imputes omnipotence to them. I was scared. Maybe you will believe me. No one else would. If I were to try out telling, which I won’t. And the consequent effect is not the traditional one that I don’t ‘defend’ myself against anyone thinking ill of me; quite the contrary, I’m getting credit where it’s not due. When I came up behind him in the street, Dick said, I knew it was you, girl. Your daughter was expected. The man in France was the one I could talk to; and when it came to the point, this was the one subject I couldn’t open with him. Not that he lacks the ability to imagine — what? This place, all of us here. He reads a lot about us. Our aleatory destiny, he calls it. He could project. He had plenty of imagination — a writer of a kind, as a matter of fact, as well as professor (but he laughs at the academic pretensions of that title). Once while I was drying myself after a shower he suddenly came out with an idea for a science fiction book that would make money. Suppose it were to happen that through chemicals used to kill pests, increase crops etc. we were to lose the coating of natural oils on the skin that makes us waterproof, as the oil on duck’s feathers does — we begin to absorb water — we become waterlogged and rot… On another level, it could even be seen as an allegory of capitalist exploitation of the people through abuse of natural resources… — I would never have thought of that.

J. B. Marks, your first choice as best man, died in Moscow while you were in prison. I managed to tell you. Now again I have the impression of passing on bits of news as I did through the wire grille. I won’t see Ivy; she was gone, on orders, before the Greer trial. If she had stayed she would have been on trial, once more; she was named in absentia as a co-conspirator in the indictment. The prosecutor said she was the one who recruited Orde; Theo appeared and pleaded that his client’s outraged sense of injustice, coupled with the experience of a political journalist in this country that attempts at constitutional change are constantly defeated, led him to the hands of people who understood this outrage.

And so, at last, you. It’s to you…

All the while the air is thick with summer, threaded with life, birds, dragonflies, butterflies, swaying lantern-shapes of travelling midges. After heavy rains the concrete buildings have a morning bloom in the sun that makes them look organic to me. The freeway passes John Vorster Square at the level of the fifth storey and in the windows of the rooms with the basic units of furniture from which people have jumped, I see as I drive there are hen-and-chicken plants in pots on the sills. Your lucidity missed nothing, in the cell or round the swimming-pool, eh. A sublime lucidity. I have some inkling of it. Don’t think I’m gloomy — down in the dumps. Happiness is not moral or productive, is it. I know it’s possible to be happy while (I suppose that was so) damaging someone by it. From that it follows naturally it’s possible to feel very much alive when terrible things — dread and pain and threatening courage — are also in the air.

I’ve been to see the Nels. They were glad I came. I had always been welcome any time. There’s a Holiday Inn where the commercial travellers mostly go, now. But the off-sales trade is unaffected. The Vroue Federasie has its annual meeting in a private room at the Holiday Inn, Auntie Velma told me (distracted for a moment from her trouble), even though it’s licensed premises. And the chief of the nearby Homeland comes to lunch in the restaurant with the white mining consultants who are looking into the possibility that there’s tin and chrome in his ‘country’.

The Coen Nels are bewildered. I hadn’t realized it could be such an overwhelming state of mind. More than anything else — bewildered. They were so proud of her, in a quasi-government position, speaking a foreign language; the brains of your side of the family, but put to the service of her country, boosting our agricultural produce. So proud of Marie, her sophisticated life — all this time imagining Paris as the Champs-Elysées pictured in the cheap prints sold to backveld hotels.

At the farm I asked to be put in one of the rondavels instead of the main house. They didn’t argue on grounds of offended hospitality; when people are in trouble they somehow become more understanding of unexplained needs or whims, don’t they. Walking at night after these dousing rains, the farm house, the sheds sheer away from me into a ground-mist you can lick off your lips. Wine still isn’t served at the table but Uncle Coen made us drink brandy. I moved unevenly through drenched grass, I bumped into the water-tank, I thought only my legs were affected but I suppose my head was. I put my ear to the side of the stone barn wall where bees nest in the cavity, and heard them on the boil, in there. Layer upon layer of night concealed them. I walked round, not through, the shadows of walls and sheds, and on the bonnets of the parked cars light from somewhere peeled away sheets of dark and shone. Like fluttering eyelashes all about me: warmth, damp and insects. I broke the stars in puddles. It’s so easy to feel close to the soil, isn’t it; no wonder all kinds of dubious popular claims are made on that base. The strong searchlights the neighbouring farmers have put up high above their homesteads, now, show through black trees. Headlights move on the new road; the farmlands are merging with the dorp. But it’s too far away to hear a yell for help. If they came out now from behind the big old syringa trees with the nooses of wire left from kids’ games in the branches, and the hanging length of angle iron that will be struck at six in the morning to signal the start of the day’s work, if they loped out silently and put a Russian or Cuban machine-gun at my back, or maybe just took up (it’s time?) a scythe or even a hoe — that would be it: a solution. Not bad. But it won’t happen to me, don’t worry. I went to bed in the rondavel and slept the way I had when I was a child, thick pink Waverley blankets kicked away, lumpy pillow punched under my neck. Anyone may have come in the door and looked down on me; I wouldn’t have stirred.

One day there may be a street named for the date. A great many people were detained, arrested or banned on 19th October 1977; many organizations and the only national black newspaper were banned. Most of the people were black — Africans, Indians, Coloureds. Most belonged to the Black Consciousness organizations — the Black People’s Convention, South African Students’ Organization, Soweto Students’ Representative Council, South African Student Movement, the Black Parents’ Association, and others, more obscure, whites had never heard of before. Some belonged to the underground organizations of the earlier, long banned, liberation movements. And some belonged to both. All — organizations, newspaper, individuals — appeared to have been freshly motivated for more than a year by the revolt of schoolchildren and students on the issue of inferior education for blacks. Hundreds of teachers had accepted the authority of the children’s school boycott and resigned in support of it. No persuasion, bribery, or strength of threat by the government had yet succeeded with the young and the elders to whom they were mentor; and the government, for its part, refused to abolish the separate system of education for blacks. However the situation was summed up the explanation remained simplistic. The majority of children in Soweto had never returned to school after June 1976.

A few white people were detained, arrested, house-arrested or banned on 19th October 1977, and in the weeks following. The Burger girl was one. She was taken away by three policemen who were waiting at her flat when she returned from work on an afternoon in November. The senior man was Captain Van Jaarseveld, who to make her feel at home with him under interrogation in one of the rooms with two chairs and a table, reminded her that he had known her father well.

She was detained without charges. Like thousands of other people taken into custody all over the country, she might be kept for weeks, months, several years, before being let out again. But her lawyer, Theo Santorini, had reason to believe — indeed, a public prosecutor himself had indicated in a moment of professionally-detached indiscretion during one of their frequent encounters when the courts adjourned for tea or lunch — that the State was expecting to gather evidence to bring her to Court in an important breakthrough for Security — a big trial — at last — of Kgosana’s wife. — That one — he said; and Santorini smiled his plump, sad cherub smile. That was the important one. For many years he had been engaged with the same prosecutor in the running battle for tattered legalities by which he had got Marisa Kgosana acquitted time and again. The government — police probably even more so, because as they complained to her lawyer, she ‘gave them a hard time’, offering not so much as one of her red fingernails’ length of co-operation when they were only doing their duty — the Minister of Justice wanted her out of the way, inside, convicted for a long stretch. The public prosecutor, so far as Kgosana was concerned, made a suggestion for her own good, quite objectively, in the form of a warning to Santorini. It would be better for this client of his not to risk airing, in answer to allegations being made about her at the Commission of Inquiry into the Soweto Riots then in session, any line of defence that might be useful to the prosecution in the event of a future case brought against her. He would do best not to press for her to be ‘produced’—for Marisa was in detention, too.

Prisons for women awaiting trial and women detainees are not among the separate amenities the country prides itself on providing. Where Rosa and Clare Terblanche found themselves held there were also Coloured, Indian and African women; different colours and grades of pigmentation did not occupy adjoining cells or those served by the same lavatories and baths, nor were they allowed into the prison yard at the same time, but the prison was so old that actual physical barriers against internal communication were ramshackle and the vigilance of the female warders, mini-skirted novices dedicated to the Chief Matron as to the abbess of an Order, could not prevent messages, the small precious gifts of prison economy (cigarettes, a peach, a tube of hand-cream, a minute electric torch) from being exchanged between the races. Or songs. Early on, Marisa’s penetrating, wobbly contralto announced her presence not far off, from her solitary confinement to Rosa’s, and Clare’s. She sang hymns, piously gliding in and out of the key of ‘Abide with me’ to ANC freedom songs in Xhosa, and occasionally bursting into Miriam Makeba’s click song — this last to placate and seduce the wardresses, for whom it was a recognizable pop number. The voices of other black women took up and harmonized whatever she sang, quickly following the changes in the repertoire. The black common law prisoners eternally polishing Matron’s granolithic cloister, round the yard, picked up tiny scrolled messages dropped when Rosa and Clare were allowed to go out to empty their slops or do their washing, and in the same way the cleaning women delivered messages to them. Marisa was at once the most skilled of political old lags and the embodiment, the avatar of some kind of authority even Matron could not protect herself against: Marisa got permission to be escorted to Rosa’s cell twice weekly for therapeutic exercises for a spinal ailment she said was aggravated by sedentary life in prison. Laughter escaped. through the thick diamond-mesh and bars of Rosa’s cell during these sessions. Although detainees were not allowed writing materials for any purpose other than letters which were censored by Chief Warder Magnus Cloete before being mailed, Rosa asked for sketching materials. A ‘Drawing Book’ of the kind used in kindergartens and a box of pastels were delivered by her lawyer and passed scrutiny. The wardresses found baie, baie mooi (they talked with her in their mother tongue, which was also hers) the clumsy still lifes with which she attempted to teach herself what she had claimed was her ‘hobby’, and the naive imaginary landscape that could rouse no suspicions that she might be incorporating plans of the lay-out of the prison etc. — it represented, in a number of versions, a village covering a hill with a castle on the apex, a wood in the foreground, the sea behind. The stone of the houses seemed to give a lot of trouble: it was tried out in pinks, greys, even brownish orange. She had been more successful with the gay flags on the battlements of the castle and the bright sails of tiny boats, although through some failure of perspective they were sailing straight for the tower. The light appeared to come from everywhere; all objects were sunny. At Christmas detainees were allowed to send home-made cards to a reasonable number of relatives or friends. Rosa’s was a scene banally familiar to Chief Warder Cloete from any rack of greeting cards — a group of carol singers, and only the delighted recipients could recognize, unmistakably, despite the lack of skill with which the figures were drawn, Marisa, Rosa, Clare, and an Indian associate of them all; and understood that these women were in touch with each other, if cut off from the outside world.

Theo Santorini did not repeat, even to those closest to Rosa Burger’s family over many years, the strong probability that the State would try to establish collusion of Rosa with Marisa in conspiracy to further the aims of Communism and/or the African National Congress. The charges would allege incitement, and aiding and abetting of the students’ and schoolchildren’s revolt.

His discretion has not prevented speculation. What Rosa did in her last two weeks in London is unclear. She did have contact with Leftist exiles, after all. She was at a rally (informers are inclined to up-grade their information) for Frelimo leaders, where her presence was honoured by a speech, delivered by one of his former close associates, lauding her father, Lionel Burger. That much was under surveillance, and will certainly appear in any indictment. She apparently abandoned without explanation an intention to go into exile in France, where the French Anti-Apartheid Movement was ready to regard her as a cockade in its cap. She told no one, no one, how she occupied her time, between the meeting with old associates at the rally or party and her return. It’s reasonable to suppose she could have been planning with others, putting herself at the service of the latest strategy of the struggle that will go on until the last prisoner comes off Robben Island and the last sane dissident is let out of an Eastern European asylum. Who could believe children could revolt of their own volition? The majority of white people advance the theory of agitators (unspecified), and the banned and underground organizations adopt the revolt as part of their own increased momentum, if not direct inspiration. Sailors gag on stinking meat, children refuse to go to school. No one knows where the end of suffering will begin.

A woman carrying fruit boxes and flowers stood among a group at the prison doors.

She had pressed the bell with more force and a few seconds longer than would seem necessary. The few people outside could hear it ringing thinly in there. Nevertheless there was a wait for any response; she chatted with them — a black prostitute holding bail-money in a gold plastic purse and moving a tumour of chewing-gum from one side of her jaw to the other, two women arguing in whispered Zulu expletives, a youth accompanying an old relative smoking a pipe with a little chain attaching its cover. They were patient. The youth danced, as one hums inaudibly, on heel and toe of blue, red and black track shoes. The woman was white, she knew her rights, she was used to regarding officialdom as petty and ridiculous, not powerful. — Are they asleep? — The high, penetrating voice of a rich madam. — How long’ve you been here? You shouldn’t just stand — they’re supposed to answer, you know. — The blacks were used to being ignored and bypassed by whites and were wary of any assumption of common cause, except for the young prostitute, who knew white men too intimately to be impressed by the women they were born of. She pulled a face. — They did come, but they say we must wait.—

— Wait! Well we’ve waited long enough. — The white woman put her thumb on the bell and made a play of leaning all her weight against it, smiling back at everyone jauntily. Her hair was dyed and like the dark windows of her sunglasses, contrasted with her lined white forehead; she was a woman in her mid-fifties with the energetic openness of a charming girl. The hand that pressed the bell wore jade and ivory. The prostitute giggled encouragement — Ouuu, that’s beautiful, I’d like to have a ring like that. For me.—

— Which one? — No, this little one’s my favourite — you see how it’s made? Isn’t that clever—

The speak-easy slot in the doors opened and a mime’s face appeared in the frame, two taut thin bows of eyebrows, eyes outlined in black, cheeks chalked pink.

— I’ve got some things for detainees. — The woman was brisk; the painted-on face said nothing. The slot shut and the woman had just turned her head in exasperated comment to her companions when there were oiled sounds of bolts and keys moving and a door within one of the great doors opened to let her in. It closed at once, behind her alone; the wardress who owned the face said — Wait.—

The woman’s cream pleated skirt and yellow silk shirt reflected light in the dark well of brick and concrete, so that some creature with rags tied to protect the knees, washing the floor, gazed up. An after-image appeared before the eyes that returned to mop and floor. The scents of fine soap, creams, leather, clothes kept in cupboards where sachets hung, a lily-based distilled perfume, and even a faint natural fruit-perfume of plums and mangoes was an aura that set the woman apart in the trapped air impregnated with dull smells of bad cooking and the lye of institution hygiene, the odour under broken nails leached to the quick. The visitor had been here before; nothing was changed: except the outfit of the wardresses, black and white — they were got up in what seemed to her to be the remaindered uniforms worn five years ago by air hostesses — she travelled a good deal. Under the stairs on the left were suitcases and cardboard boxes tied with rope and labelled, even a few coats; possessions taken from detainees on their reception, awaiting the day or night of their release. She saw the bright sunlight enclosed in the jail yard. The fat ornamental palms, the purplish shiny skin of the granolithic. She skilfully glided a few steps forward to take a quick look, but there was no one out for exercise — supposing they were to be allowed anywhere near the entrance, anyway.

Tiny skirt winking on a round high bottom, the tilted body on high heels led her to the Chief Matron’s office.

Like — like…to describe Chief Matron to people afterwards it was necessary to find some comparison with an image in a setting that was part of their experience, because she was a feature of one in which they had never been and an element in a scale of aesthetic values established by it alone. Like the patron’s wife in a bar or dance-hall in a nineteenth-century French painting — Toulouse-Lautrec, yes — but more like those of a second-rater, say, Felicien Rops. Her desk was wedged under barathea-covered breasts. She wore service-ribbons, and gold earrings pressed into fleshy lobes. The little wardress’s eyebrows were a fair imitation of her red-brown ones, drawn high from close to either side of the nose-bridge. Her little plump hand with nails painted a thick, refined rose-pink tapped a ballpoint and moved among papers she looked at through harlequin glasses with gilt-scrolled sidepieces. There were gladioluses in a vase on the floor. A wilting spray of white carnations with a tinsel bow stood in a glass on the desk — perhaps she had been to a police ball.

The visitor carried two wooden fruit-trays and a big untidy bunch of daisies and roses from her own garden. — Rosa Burger and Marisa Kgosana. Their names are on labels. Plums, mangoes, oranges and some boiled sweets — loose. In open packets. I can’t bring a cake, I understand?—

— No, no cake. — The tone of someone exchanging remarks on the oddities of the menu in a cafeteria.

— Not even if I were to cut it right open, in front of you? — The visitor was smiling, head inclined, flirtatious, corner of her mouth drawn in contemptuously.

The Chief Matron shared a little joke, that was all. — Not even then, no, it’s not allowed, you know. Just put the boxes on the floor there, thank you so much, we’ll see they get it just now. Right away. — No one was going to equal her in ladylike correctness. — Sign in the book, your name please.—

— And the flowers are in two bunches…could you perhaps put them in a bucket of water? It was so hot in the car. — A couple of Pomeranians were sniffing at the visitor’s shoes. The Chief Matron reproached them in Afrikaans — Down Dinkie, down boy. You’ll tear the lady’s stockings — Flowers are not allowed any more. I don’t know what…it’s a new order just came through yesterday, no more flowers to be accepted. I’m very sorry, ay?—

— Why?—

— I really can’t say, I don’t know, you know…—

— My name’s on the boxes.—

— But just put it down here please — the wardress jumped to offer a large register almost before the signal — Let me see, yes… that’s right, and the address — thank you very much — The manner was that of getting amiably over with a mere matter of form: the necessity for well-intentioned sympathetic ladies to commit themselves in their own hand to acquaintance, to association with political suspects. The Chief Matron moved her lips over the syllables of the name as though to test whether it was false or genuine: Flora Donaldson.

People detained under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act are not allowed visitors, even next of kin. But when later Rosa Burger became an awaiting-trial prisoner she was entitled to the privileges of that status, and in the absence of any blood relative, Flora Donaldson sought and was given permission to see her. Other applicants were refused, with the single exception of Brandt Vermeulen who, no doubt through influence in high places, was suddenly there, when Rosa was taken to the visitors’ room one day. These were not contact visits; Rosa received her visitors from behind a wire grille. It is not known what Brandt Vermeulen talked about in the category of ‘domestic matters’ to which the subject of prison conversations is confined, under surveillance of attendant warders. He is a fluent, amusing talker and a broadminded man of many interests, anyway, not likely to be at a loss. Flora reported that Rosa ‘hadn’t changed much’. She remarked on this to her husband, William. — She’s all right. In good shape. She looked like a little girl, I gather Leela Govind or somebody’s cut her hair again for her, just to here, in her neck… About fourteen… except she’s somehow livelier than she used to be. In a way. Less reserved. We joke a lot — that’s something the bloody warders find hard to follow. After all, why shouldn’t family matters be funny? They’re boring enough. You only realize quite how boring when you have to try to make them metaphors for something else…Theo tells me Defence’s going to give the State witnesses hell. He thinks she’s got a good chance of getting away with it this time — the State may have to drop charges after the preliminary examination. In which case she’ll probably be house-arrested as soon as she’s released…well all right, anything rather than jail? — there’re a lot of things you can do while house-arrested, after all, Rosa’ll get out to go to work every day—

A letter came to Madame Bagnelli in France. It bore the stamp of the Prisons Department in Pretoria but this aroused no interest in the handsome postman who stopped in for a pernod when he delivered the mail, because he could not read English and did not know where Pretoria was. In a passage dealing with the comforts of a cell as if describing the features of a tourist hotel that wasn’t quite what the brochure might have suggested—I have rigged up out of fruit boxes a sort of Japanese-style portable desk (remember the one old Ivan Poliakoff had, the one he used when he wrote in bed) and that’s what I’m writing at now—there was a reference to a watermark of light that came into the cell at sundown every evening, reflected from some west-facing surface outside; something Lionel Burger once mentioned. But the line had been deleted by the prison censor. Madame Bagnelli was never able to make it out.